LITTLE HOMELAND

Where once there were fields, now there are warehouses. Where once there was earth, there’s concrete. The countryside that remains is simply a means of sustenance, perhaps a way to get rich. The North East of Italy (but it’s just an example, and it could just as well be any other area), where values and human relationships seem to have been steamrollered over in the name of money and rampant individualism that focuses solely on its own needs, provides the backdrop to the story of Lucia and Renata.

The two girls live in a little village in the provinces. Their only thought is how to make money so they can get away. They’re working as underpaid waitresses in a large hotel. Luisa (Maria Roveran) has an Albanian boyfriend, Bilal, whom she uses – without his knowledge – to put on erotic displays observed, as a paying spectator, by a man with whom Renata (Roberta Da Soller) is caught up in a relationship revolving around sex and extortion. Relations between the locals and the immigrants are tense, and Lucia and Bilal are aware of this. All of them are set to play a role and to be exploited in a perverse web of presumed or actual wrongs suffered and the vendetta that arises from them.

In this first, quality feature-length film by Alessandro Rossetto, following his long experience as a documentary maker, the grim tale of betrayed dreams, blackmail and shattered love stories paints a brutally clear picture of Italy as a country heading straight over a precipice, created by a cultural void that is eating away at those fundamental principles essential for any kind of civil coexistence.